http://www.javiertordable.com/Ghost 0.5Tue, 31 Mar 2015 10:40:04 GMT60The last few months I’ve been using a Jawbone tracker. It’s a small bracelet which keeps track of steps and sleep patterns. And it’s been very useful to help me sleep a bit longer. From what I understand most people don’t get enough sleep, so I recommend checking it out. A while back I achieved a nice milestone. A thousand hours of sleep and one million steps.

One thousand hours of sleep.

And one million steps.

]]>http://www.javiertordable.com/jawbone/1fafde42-8c03-4089-81cf-e55e83dd76bdMon, 23 Feb 2015 04:56:12 GMTI recently ported the blog to Ghost. Now it's time to say goodbye to AppEngine. I had to make several updates in order to keep the application running, and the amount of work was just too big to justify. Now I happily let Ghost run the blog and I just write.

]]>http://www.javiertordable.com/goodbye-appengine/649719bc-3cf2-4cc9-a80b-692e7e7e0805Mon, 16 Feb 2015 01:19:07 GMTYesterday I finally finished porting over the blog content from the old platform into Ghost. And today I set up a new mailing list using MailChimp. The updates to the blog are almost complete...]]>http://www.javiertordable.com/mailchimp-mailing-list/f65c57bf-2917-4149-9b28-7210b23612e2Wed, 04 Feb 2015 01:50:28 GMTLet's see how this works out. New blogging platform. Hello Ghost!

I really like the markdown editor of Ghost. It's very easy to add things like lists:

One

Two

Three

And include code samples:

for i in range(10):
print(i**2)

Which will make it easier for me to write frequently. But I suspect I will have to do a bit of customization here and there.

]]>http://www.javiertordable.com/hello-ghost/4d3e393f-0ab1-4294-962d-87c2d3e2112dSat, 10 Jan 2015 20:00:00 GMT
Everybody who has spent some time working in a business of any size knows that
Excel is ubiquitous. It's surprising that there are so few companies out there
working in the spreadsheet world.

Recently I had to create a bunch of Excel reports, and I took some time to
explore ideas on how to structure a library for easy report creation.
I took the excellent
XlsxWriter
library and built a few conveniences on top of it. Check out the first
iteration of XlsxReports
in my Github page.

The Illustris project is a large cosmological simulation of galaxy formation,
completed in late 2013, using a state of the art numerical code and a
comprehensive physical model. Building on several years of effort by members
of the collaboration, the Illustris simulation represents an unprecedented
combination of high resolution, total volume, and physical fidelity.

]]>http://www.javiertordable.com/universe-simulation/bffffb57-eb0f-41ce-8de3-112404f62ea1Sat, 10 May 2014 19:00:00 GMT
A raytracer in the back of a business card! Here is the code:

]]>http://www.javiertordable.com/raytracer-business-card/e006a0ef-3deb-4c13-80f4-02837ed02f4cMon, 10 Mar 2014 19:00:00 GMT
One of my favorite features from github is the activity chart that appears in the user profile.
For example, this one from user jmcnamara:

However, I don't really use github except for
one of my older projects. In part because I prefer Mercurial over git. So I decided to
write a small tool to generate these charts for my own local repositories.

There are two interesting parts. First, reading the change list data from Mercurial:

You can find the entire code of the
chart script in Github (of course!)

]]>http://www.javiertordable.com/github-activity-chart/634b304b-5532-47ee-be83-d457122b73ceFri, 28 Feb 2014 20:00:00 GMT
Hello, internets! I just redesigned the look & feel of the blog. The new
design has bigger font sizes and less distractions. It's optimized for
mobile so it should look much better than before on Android and iOS phones,
and especially on iPad.

Apart from the new sleek design now each post has multiple social buttons,
to +1 on Google Plus, Like on Facebook, tweet on Twitter and share on LinkedIn
to your heart's content. Check them out below.

UPDATE(2/1/2015): The design and buttons have been replaced with the Ghost defaults.

]]>http://www.javiertordable.com/blog-redesign-social-buttons/257e37f6-2a64-466a-9784-ad6e56a60e04Sun, 16 Feb 2014 20:00:00 GMT
A few weeks ago I had the chance to read
Masters of Doom by David Kushner and found it very interesting.
It tells the story of John Carmack and John Romero, the founders of id Software
and authors of some the most revolutionary videogames ever.

The book includes the biographies of Carmack and Romero, as well
as plenty of anectodes of their wild ride in the world of videogames. But
the part that I found most interesting was the story of how Carmack became
such a talented (and widely acclaimed) software engineer. Highly recommended.

]]>http://www.javiertordable.com/masters-of-doom/3f840a7b-4e18-4568-bd3e-99192f478d8cThu, 13 Feb 2014 20:00:00 GMT
A while back I found a beautiful website on Mathematics and I wanted to
share the link: Mathigon has a
series of introductory articles and many images, figures and interactive
visualizations on a variety of mathematical topics.

The content is quite basic, but it's presented in a great way, the website
is well built, and the pictures are fantastic.

]]>http://www.javiertordable.com/mathigon/e4bf894c-21b6-42a0-93e7-592422368fb9Mon, 23 Dec 2013 20:00:00 GMT
I guess this is the advanced version of the
companion cube:
]]>http://www.javiertordable.com/cube-that-can-walk/6d851467-add7-4d7a-9f2d-92382c2384a4Mon, 23 Dec 2013 20:00:00 GMT
I haven't done any kind of 3D design in many years, but I was thinking
last week that it would be fun to get back to it. And while I was looking
at software available for Linux, I found
Blender.

Blender has been around for
quite some time
but it seems that now it's
features are up to par with some of the most popular 3D packages
like 3DS Max or Alias.

Apart from the 3D design tools Blender has one very cool feature, a
Python API! I will post another note after I have the
chance to try it out.

]]>http://www.javiertordable.com/blender/fa74e272-3df6-43fc-b699-cadcbf15acdbSun, 01 Dec 2013 20:00:00 GMT
A primality test in one line of Perl:

]]>http://www.javiertordable.com/one-line-primality-test/c7928060-3ed5-4825-8661-13b971b7ab07Sat, 09 Nov 2013 20:00:00 GMT
I haven't had much time to write lately, work is keeping me busy. But today
I wanted to share a site I found recently and I think is really interesting.
It's essentially a git tutorial, but with a twist.

As most of you know git is a version control
system. Essentially, a program to track and coordinate updates to a set of
files, which is one of the most basic tasks in software engineering.
Learn Git Branching
helps beginners learn how to use git. But instead of simply explaining the
git commands it's structured as a puzle game. The levels are git tree
structures, and in order to solve the puzzles it's necessary to input the
proper git commands.

The puzzles go from the very simple, to the fairly complex. So even if you
already know git, it may be fun to play the most advanced levels.